Trump has moved ”The Apprentice” from network TV (now known as “Fake News”) to Washington, D.C. based on his lame appointments to his staff and cabinet. No wonder his private companies have declared bankruptcy so many times. It is now obvious that his administration is, at least, morally bankrupt and, quite possibly, a criminal enterprise.

Let the Trump whining, angry accusatory tweetstorms, and deflection blaming begin ! ! !


Trump’s worst mistake may be the lousy people he hires

President Donald Trump is right, so far: the sprawling investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller hasn’t shown that Trump himself did anything wrong. It may never.

But it is beginning to show that some of Trump’s top advisers were shady characters who had no business helping run a U.S. presidential campaign. Should Trump have known that? Unclear. But Trump’s history as a candidate, and now as commander-in-chief, increasingly reveals a boss who prizes loyalty over competence and risks his own success through subpar hires.

Mueller has indicted Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Manafort’s partner, Richard Gates, on charges related to foreign business dealings that may have involved money laundering. Mueller has made no connection between those charges and Manafort’s role in the Trump campaign.

Another Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, has pled guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russian officials while working on the Trump campaign. As part of that plea deal, Papadpoulus appears to be cooperating with prosecutors, which means he could provide information leading to charges against other Trump campaign officials. That’s bad news for Trump all around.

It’s worth pointing out that a few bad apples on an entire presidential campaign staff is more the norm than the exception in American politics. Scoundrels exploit politics for personal gain, sometimes illegally, just as they do in business, sports, entertainment and probably every other sector of the economy.

Trump’s advisers are loyal but unfit for the job

What’s different about Trump is his willingness to rely on senior advisers who might be loyal, but who are also weak or compromised in ways that make them ineffective at best and a major liability at worst. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned after less than a month because he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about details of his meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Flynn was appointed to run the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, but was essentially fired two years later amid questions about his competence. President Barack Obama advised Trump not to bring Flynn into his administration. Trump should have listened, but he didn’t, and Flynn’s shocking early departure became one of Trump’s first major embarrassments.

Trump’s first Health and Human Services Secretary, Tom Price, resigned in September following revelations that he needlessly flew around the country on private military jets, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Trump should have known Price was sketchy, given multiple reports of questionable stock trades he made involving companies that could have benefited from the actions of House committees Price was an influential member of. Was Price the best guy to run a large part of the government? No. But he turned out to be Trump’s guy, until petty greed sank him.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appear to be other members of Trump’s private-flyer club. They’re still in the Cabinet, with Mnuchin’s mettle soon to be tested as Republicans try to jam a tax-cut bill through Congress. Mnuchin is Trump’s point man on taxes. He originally predicted Congress would pass a tax bill by August. That prediction was laughably wrong. Mnuchin may yet redeem himself, but if tax cuts fail, Trump may seek a more capable Treasury boss.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is so beleaguered that Trump himself called him “weak.” The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, came to the job with no experience in the field and little apparent enthusiasm for it. Trump’s Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, once wanted to abolish the department he now heads. Presidents often dole out Cabinet jobs to potentates who donated to their campaigns and helped get them elected — but the appointees usually have a veneer of experience in the field, or at least interest in it.

At the White House, meanwhile, Trump has blown through so many senior aides — Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Anthony Scaramucci, Steven Bannon, and on and on — that it’s the boss who deserves the real scrutiny, rather than the ousted employees. If all of those people were unfit for the job, why did Trump hire them? It’s understandable that one or two folks might not bear up under the intense and unfamiliar pressures of the White House. But not a dozen.

Trump, the businessman, was shielded

Trump, of course, ran as a businessman able to get things done, rather than a bureaucrat only able to talk about getting things done. But as head of the Trump Organization, Trump ran a private company where he was the only boss. The consequences of bad hires were confined inside a black box.

As a candidate and now president, Trump’s bad hires have very public consequences, which are now manifest in a sprawling investigation into any Trump associate who may have run afoul of the law. Mueller may ultimately clear Trump of any criminal or suspicious activity. But he has already indicted Trump for hiring and relying on people he never should have.

More denials and deflections from Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

But the thing I find most interesting in this article is Sam Clovis . . . His involvement in the campaign, and his cabinet appointment by Trump to a position that he has absolutely no background or qualifications. And then, Sarah says there’s no reason to withdraw his nomination for the position.


Sanders denies Trump campaign encouraged Papadopoulos' Russia trip


WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday denied that senior staff on President Trump’s 2016 campaign encouraged foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos to meet with Russian officials in Moscow, contradicting a key claim in the former staffer’s sworn statement to special counsel Robert Mueller.

“My understanding is there wasn’t encouragement,” press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters at her daily briefing. “He made multiple attempts at setting up a variety of meetings that were constantly rebuffed.”

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about contacts with Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to court records unsealed by Mueller. On Monday, Sanders told reporters that “any actions” that Papadopoulos took “would have been on his own.”

Her comments put her at odds with one key section of Papadopoulos’ unsealed “Statement of Offense.” In that passage, he says that after weeks of discussions about setting up an “off-the-record” meeting with Russian officials, an unnamed “campaign supervisor” said, “I would encourage you” to “make the trip” to Moscow with another campaign foreign policy aide if “feasible.”

A campaign source told Yahoo News that the “supervisor” was Sam Clovis, a conservative radio host who was co-chairman of the campaign. Trump has nominated Clovis to be undersecretary of agriculture for research, education and economics — effectively the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist — although the former economics professor has no background in the hard sciences.

The legal documents do not provide a detailed accounting of how the Trump campaign managed any overtures from Russia, a flashpoint in Mueller’s investigation into whether the future president’s political machine abetted Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 election.

On Tuesday, Sanders said Trump had no plans to withdraw the Clovis nomination. “I’m not aware that any change would be necessary,” she said.

More evidence that the current group in the White House are not qualified to run the country and are mostly concerned with their own personal selfish interests. Matt Bai’s Column also provides some context to the Mueller investigation from both sides. Whether your perspective is as a Trump supporter or a Trump hater, both sides should wait and see where the investigation leads.


The patsy in the White House

We now live in a bizarre land of dueling realities, as if the entire country were a series on the Syfy channel. So if you’re not one of those people who hears everything from right-wingers on Facebook or talk radio, or one who only follows the leftists on Twitter or MSNBC, you might have a hard time figuring out what to make of the latest turn in our political drama.

According to one narrative, echoed by conspiracist voices on the right, the special prosecutor looking into Russia is on a politically motivated trawling expedition, and what he’s finally reeled in amounts to a couple of scrawny carp: a short-lived campaign manager and his protégé, both of whom are being charged with crimes unconnected to last year’s campaign, along with a know-nothing volunteer who acted on his own pointless delusions when he cultivated Russian emissaries.

The real scandal, according to this version of events, is that Democrats were the ones who funded all this muckraking research into Donald Trump’s Russia ties in the first place, and it was Hillary Clinton who took money from Russians in exchange for giving away a chunk of America’s precious uranium, but of course the liberal media doesn’t want to talk about any of that.

If you buy the other narrative, though, which permeates social media and the op-ed pages of the liberal intelligentsia, we’re now months — even weeks — away from the end of the Trump presidency. Robert Mueller has executed only the first in what will be a steady rain of indictments, each one contributing to rising waters around the president himself, who clearly brokered a deal with a foreign government to help him win.

In truth, neither of these narratives really reflects what we know to this point; the rightist reality is pure illusion, and the leftist reality is well ahead of the facts.

But if you ask me, the week’s events are already confirming a third, important narrative about this president — and one that’s just as damning as any criminal conspiracy.

Let’s first examine what’s real and not real in the parallel narratives around Mueller’s investigation. To you Trump backers who’ve emailed me to say this is all about media duplicity and Clinton cover-ups, I have to break it to you: You’re getting duped.

That’s not to say the media isn’t liberal or anti-Trump; I’ll grant you all that. But in a desperate effort to dismiss what Mueller has unearthed, conservative media has purposely conflated a bunch of things that, taken in context, aren’t terribly relevant at the moment.

Yes, it does appear that Democrats funded some of the sleazy research into Trump and his ties to Russians, along with rival Republicans. Yes, some Democratic lobbyists — including the brother of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman — appear to have done some of the same lobbying for pro-Russian interests that Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign manager, did.

Yes, there was a pretty arcane deal under the Obama administration to sell some American plutonium to a company with Russian investors, and one former investor had given money to the Clinton Foundation.

But we already knew that our politics — on both sides, and always where the Clintons are concerned — is distorted by unseemly greed and influence-mongering, from interests both domestic and foreign.

None of this detracts from the gravity of what Trump’s campaign is accused of doing, which is actively colluding with another government to install an American president.

As for my Trump-hating friends who say the truth is out and justice is at hand, I’d caution against over-extrapolating. The charges against Manafort, to this point, are charges a diligent prosecutor probably could bring against a lot of lobbyists in Washington. They have nothing to do with collusion.

And it really isn’t certain at this point that George Papadopoulos, one of the less-than-impressive names on Trump’s less-than-impressive roster of so-called foreign policy experts during the campaign, had any real impact when it came to fostering cooperation between his Russian contacts and the candidate.

That’s the thing about hastily adding random “advisers” to a campaign, all because you wake up one day and realize that you really have no campaign to speak of and you want to sound more substantive than you are. Those advisers can then run around doing anything they want on your behalf.

The only thing for sure right now is that Mueller has his talons into some Trump associates who would probably throw the president off a plane before they’d spend a single day in jail, so it’s fair to assume that whatever they know will be known to all of us before long.

Is it at least plausible that Manafort and Papadopoulos and others in their orbit could have been acting as de facto Russian agents without Trump or his coterie of little Trumps really being aware of it? Or that the Trumps were vaguely aware of what was happening but didn’t think it was such a big deal?

I actually do think that’s plausible. And it’s a version of events I find just as disconcerting as any other.

Because the picture that emerges here is of a president who turns out to be an easy mark for every spy and con man who walks through the door.

Of course the Russians were trying to work sources in both parties to their own advantage — that’s what the Russians do, everywhere. I’m sure the American electoral system is a door they’ve been pushing on for decades, every four years, in the vaguest hopes of finding a path to influence.

Imagine how surprised they must have been when that door suddenly swung open, with their American recruits sitting at the top levels of the campaign and even delivering them a meeting in Trump Tower with the candidate’s son. It must have felt like Christmas in the Kremlin.

No wonder Vladimir Putin set out to help elect Trump. Wouldn’t you have, too, if you were the strongman of a rival power? He didn’t need some explicit deal.

It must have been clear as Russian crystal that this was a potential first family he could manipulate and outmaneuver, unlike all the more sophisticated political operations over the years that never would have given his agents the time of day.

The same holds true, in a sense, for Manafort. It’s pretty clear now that one of the party’s shadier operatives came out of a long retirement from electoral politics because he saw a rare opening — no one else wanted to help Trump then — and thought he could profit from his proximity to power.

Manafort materialized from nowhere, bent on using the Trumps as a bodybuilding supplement for his off-books lobbying business, so he could buy himself more custom suits. And what did Trump, the streetwise mogul who’s always going on about his fancy degree from Wharton, say?

You seem like a credible guy. You’re hired! Let me introduce you to Jared!

I don’t know right now what Trump did or didn’t do, knowingly, to compromise the democracy, and unless your name is Mueller, you’re probably not qualified to say, either. We’ll find out in time.

What we do know — and it may well be the most charitable interpretation of the facts we have — is that Trump and his entire family were hopelessly out of their depth and dangerously credulous when it came to running for president, and now they’re running the country.

There’s no narrative here in which we don’t have a patsy for a president, in a dangerous and confusing world. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.

Clovis has withdrawn his nomination for the Department of Agriculture as the department’s chief scientist — a position for which he has absolutely no training or qualifications. Clovis is currently entangled in the Mueller investigation, but blames his withdrawal on purely political attacks on himself and Trump.

Curiously, Clovis will continue on with his current position in the Department of Agriculture — a position that he was appointed to by Trump and required no senate approval. Again, a position for which he has absolutely no qualifications.


Trump USDA Nominee Withdraws After Link to Russia Probe

By
Joe Sobczyk
November 2, 2017, 11:14 AM EDT

Early Trump supporter brought Papadopoulos into campaign

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in special counsel investigation

Sam Clovis, an early backer backer of President Donald Trump caught up in the special counsel’s Russia investigation, has withdrawn his nomination to be a top official in the Agriculture Department, according to the White House.

Clovis, a former fighter pilot and conservative talk-radio host from Iowa, brought into the Trump campaign George Papadopoulos, who has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russians. Court filings say Papadopoulos had meetings with Russians seeking to provide incriminating information about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.

Clovis was picked by Trump to be Agriculture undersecretary for research, education and economics and his nomination was already in trouble in the Senate because of some of his past writings and statements and questions about whether he was qualified for a job meant to be filled by a scientist.

He drew further scrutiny after the release of court documents related to Papadopoulos’s guilty plea. His lawyer confirmed that Clovis was the unnamed “campaign supervisor” cited in the documents who received emails from Papadopoulos about attempts to arrange meetings between the campaign and Russian representatives.

Clovis, in a statement released earlier this week, said Papadopoulos was acting on his own and that the campaign had a strict rule against traveling abroad and claiming to speak on behalf of the campaign.

“The political climate inside Washington has made it impossible for me to receive balanced and fair consideration for this position,” Clovis said in a letter to Trump that was released by the White House. “The relentless assaults on you and your team seem to be a blood sport that only increases in intensity each day.”

Papadopoulos was one of five volunteer advisers on foreign policy identified by Trump in a March 2016 interview. Over the next several months, according to court documents, he cultivated at least three contacts who promised “dirt” on Clinton, Trump’s election rival, and introductions to top-level Russians. He kept some people in the campaign, including Clovis, apprised of his efforts by email.

The communications, by Skype, Facebook, text and email, show the electronic trail the government is following to verify how the campaign handled Russian contacts.

Clovis, who is already working for the Agriculture Department in an adviser job that doesn’t require Senate confirmation, suggested in his withdrawal letter that he would stay on in his current role. Clovis said in the letter to Trump that he “will continue to serve at the pleasure of you and the Secretary of Agriculture.”

Ole Rick is as dumb as a sack of hammers.